Announcing the Google CS Engagement Small Awards Program

Posted by Leslie Yeh Johnson, University Relations

(cross-posted on the Google for Education blog)

College students are more interested than ever in studying computer science. There has been an unprecedented increase in enrollment in Computer Science undergraduate programs over the past six years. Harvard University’s popular introductory CS course CS50 has recently claimed the spot as the most enrolled course on campus. An astounding 50% of Harvey Mudd’s graduates received engineering degrees this year. However, while the overall number of students in introductory computer science courses continue to climb, the number of students who go on to complete undergraduate degrees in this field, particularly among women and under-represented minorities, does not match this increase in individual course enrollment (2013 Taulbee Survey).

Recent findings show that while students may begin a CS degree program, retaining students after their first year remains an issue. Research indicates that one of the strongest factors in the retention of students in undergraduate CS degrees is early exposure to engaging courses and course material, such as high quality assignments that are meaningful and relevant to the student’s life or classroom activities that encourage student-to-student interaction. When an instructor or department imbeds these practices into the introductory CS classroom, students remain excited about CS and are more likely to complete their undergraduate CS degree.

At Google we believe in the importance of preparing the next generation of computer scientists. To this end, we’ve created the CS Engagement Small Grants Program to support educators teaching introductory computer science courses in reaching their engagement and retention goals. We’ll give unrestricted gifts of $5,000 to the selected applicants’ universities, towards the execution of engaging CS1 or CS2 courses in the 2014-2015 school year. We encourage educators who are teaching CS1 and CS2 courses at the post-secondary level to apply to the Google CS Engagement Small Grants Program. Applications will be accepted through November 15, 2014 and will be evaluated on an ongoing basis. If you’re interested in applying, please check out the Call for Proposals.

Read More..

IDC Solid state drive hard disk speed gap small

Dell will sell you a 128GB solid state drive for an unprecedented $649. But wait. An IDC report claims the performance gap between solid state drives and lower-cost high-performance hard disk drives is not that significant at the system level.

Solid state drive offered by Dell

Solid state drives are attracting more scrutiny as they increase in capacity and decrease in price. (Dells $649 drive is a radical price drop since many drives with half the capacity still sell for more than $700.)

Solid state drives (SSDs) are considered to be generally more power efficient, faster, and in some respects more reliable than hard disk drives.

IDC tested 2.5-inch 7200 rpm desktop drives against SSDs and found that previous tests comparing SSDs and hard disk drives may be misleading, according to SearchStorage.com, which cited the IDC report.

"Many tests have been done comparing 4200 rpm hard drives to SSDs," said IDC analyst David Reinsel. "But 5400 rpm is now mainstream and even 7200 rpm disks are available." The IDC report says the performance gap between computers with 7200 rpm 2.5-inch drives and those with SSDs was smaller than expected because the performance of the entire system must be taken into account.

(It should be noted that 4200 rpm hard disk drives are sometimes used in comparative testing because 4200 rpm drives are offered along with SSDs in laptops such as the MacBook Air and Hewlett-Packard 2510p.)

IDCs Reinsel also said that system redesigns will be necessary in both PCs and enterprise storage systems to reap the full benefits of SSDs. One of the challenges is that SSDs generally write data more slowly than they read data.

In related news, The Tech Report also did benchmarking of SSDs and 2.5-inch hard disk drives rated at 5400 and 7200 rpm. Generally, the SSDs were faster (in some cases much faster) but not in every benchmark and not by that much in some benchmarks.

SSDs have received a lot more attention since companies like Apple, Hewlett-Packard, and Toshiba have adopted them as alternatives to hard disk drives in laptops. Lesser known is that SSDs are also being deployed by large corporations in server-related applications. Companies like Citibank and American Express peg server performance on IOPS or input/output operations per second where SSDs beat hard disk drives handily.

The IDC report follows other reviews that claim solid state drives (SSDs) are not as power efficient as manufacturers claim--though the power-efficiency testing methodology used by some review sites .

Read More..